As a three-year-old Australian boy slept in his bed the collection of wild
eggs he had stored in his bedroom cupboard was busy turning into a
slithering tangle of seven deadly snakes.

Kyle Cummings was lucky to escape uninjured after a family of eastern brown
snakes – the world’s second most venomous species on land – hatched in his
bedroom.

Kyle found a clutch of nine eggs a few weeks ago in the grass on his family’s
three-acre property on the outskirts of Townsville, in Queensland. His
mother, Donna Sim, helped him to store them in his bedroom cupboard, in a
plastic